Pacific Drive is a survival game where your car’s survival is more important than yours. You’ve ended up stuck in an isolated part of the Olympic Peninsula where reality’s coming apart at the seams, and you won’t get out of it alive without wheels. That requires you to scrounge through what’s left of the local towns for gas, scrap, and spare parts, all while the local fabric of space-time turns itself inside out to stop you.
I’m about 12 hours into Pacific Drive at time of writing, and what impresses me the most about it is what it doesn’t do. I’ve lost count of the survival games I’ve played in the last few years that took their inspiration from zombie movies or Mad Max, where you spend most of your time fighting people over limited resources. It’s not so much a survival game as a shooter where everyone’s in rags.
Pacific Drive, by comparison, has no combat to speak of. It’s just you, your station wagon, and a few voices on the radio, up against a hostile, unpredictable environment.
Initially announced in June 2022 at Sony’s State of Play, Pacific Drive is the debut project from Seattle-based game developer Ironwood Studios. Its team includes multiple long-time veterans of the U.S. games industry, with experience working at Oculus, Riot Games, Sucker Punch, Insomniac, and 343 Industries.
In Pacific Drive’s alternate reality, the Olympic Peninsula became a test site for a new type of technology in the 1940s. In 1955, after an unknown disaster, the U.S. government walled off the entire site and left it to rot. By 1998, the area is known as the Olympic Exclusion Zone.
You play Pacific Drive as a delivery driver who gets too close to the Zone’s wall and is pulled inside. Shortly afterward, you discover a station wagon that somehow still runs, and use it to get to relative safety. Now equipped with what might be the last working automobile in the Zone, you team up with a few surviving scientists to try to find a way back out.
Your headquarters is an auto shop in a relatively safe area, but it doesn’t have any spare parts to speak of. In order to fix up the car, and to get closer to finding an escape route, you have to drive out into more dangerous parts of the Zone. There, you’ll collect whatever raw materials you can find, navigate past the local hazards, and try to get both yourself and your station wagon back home in one piece.
Ironwood calls Pacific Drive a “driving roguelike,” where no two runs through the game will be exactly the same. Each specific location in the Zone has a consistent road map, but you won’t find the same resources or hazards on two consecutive trips.
Many of those hazards are what the game calls “anomalies”: bizarre events or objects that are scattered across the Zone. These can range from localized earthquakes to electrified fog to bizarre statues that explode if you touch them, and they can show up without warning at almost any time. I’ve had several easy runs turn into disasters, as the Zone coughed up a few lightning rods or tiny hurricanes just to keep me entertained. You’ll often have to stop during a run to figure out a way to defuse, destroy, or just get around a crowd of anomalies.
Your station wagon serves as both your means of transport and a way to protect yourself from the Zone’s less visible hazards. It’s a rusted-out wreck at the start of the game, but every time you survive a trip through the Zone, you can return to the auto shop with some spare parts, weird tech, and raw materials that you can use to gradually fix up your car. Before long, you can swap out its tires, install tougher panels, soup up the engine, and customize it into the post-apocalyptic disaster wagon of your dreams, courtesy of weird fringe science.
That sets up a simple loop: go out into the world, collect what you can, then come back to the shop and see what you can improve about your station wagon. Later in the game, you can build new workstations that let you upgrade your character’s clothes and tools, by using the Zone’s inherent weirdness to create new tech that would ordinarily be impossible. There’s nothing to stop you from rushing through Pacific Drive’s main storyline, but there’s a lot of incentive to simply explore the Zone, in order to collect the upgrades you’ll need to meet the game’s later challenges.
I’ve used the words “weird” or “weirdness” a lot in this article, which also illustrates a lot of what impresses me about Pacific Drive. Its creative director, Alexander Dracott, told me at PAX last year that much of the game is based on his old hobby of taking long road trips to nowhere, and a lot of that comes through in the final product. Pacific Drive feels personal, the same way that an independent movie or novel would, and that’s a rarer quality in modern video games than I’d like it to be.
That being said, I do have notes. I’ve run into a few bugs in my time with Pacific Drive, most of which involve its in-game physics. At one point, I got out of my car and got randomly teleported to the top of a nearby radio tower; at another, I tried to open the driver’s side door and the entire car was suddenly driven four feet straight down.
In fairness, there are a couple of mechanics built into Pacific Drive that make it easy to recover from unanticipated situations, including a system that lets you teleport your car to a safe location if it ends up on its side. As a result, I’ve hit some bugs, but I’ve yet to find one that actually stopped my progress.
Most of my other issues that I’d raise all come down to being a matter of personal taste. I don’t usually like driving in video games, because most of the time, they feel like they control markedly worse than a real car would in the same situation. Pacific Drive isn’t any exception to that, and in addition, often asks you to go off-road. While you can eventually install better tires, the first few hours of Pacific Drive give you a substantial handicap, since your car’s in such dire shape.
It’s a testament to the rest of the package that I stuck with the game despite that. Pacific Drive is a unique experience in a genre and medium that doesn’t have enough unique experiences. You’d probably get more out of it if you’re fond of real-life road trips, but it’s a trip worth taking for anyone who likes strange science fiction.
Pacific Drive is available now for PlayStation 5, Steam, and the Epic Games Store.
[Ironwood Studios provided a Steam code for Pacific Drive for the purpose of this review.]
